I am not an athlete, Part II

Workout notes 4 mile hike with Olivia; took a wrong turn on an out and back and got a glare.
Still, it was a fun hike.

Continuation: here is part I

Junior High/High School I remember the summers following my 8′th grade year; every summer from 1973 onward I would work out to get ready for football season. Prior to my freshman year of high school (1973) I hit the weights pretty hard and worked myself up to a bench press of, gasp, 170 pounds. One of the guys came in the weight room and asked me what I was doing. I told him and he said “let me try” and he got the weight on his first try with no lifting at all.

Oh yes, he went on to become the starting fullback for Georgia Tech as a sophomore (his name was Rodney Lee).

THAT is an athlete.

At the Naval Academy, I always struggled just to pass the obstacle course; I failed it twice during my freshman year. Most people didn’t have a problem; they went over the obstacles quickly and jogged in between; on the other hand I ran like crazy between the obstacles and went over them very gingerly. Yes, I practiced this stupid course and still only barely passed.

Athletes didn’t have a problem “passing” the o course; mind you I did fine in pull-ups, mile run (5:30 to 5:40 usually).

I was in flight school in Pensacola for a brief time; yes there was an obstacle course there, yes I practiced it, and yes, I failed the first time (passed the next time). I was so frustrated I actually cried in private. The next day, I took out my frustrations on the XC running course obtaining a “PT” time (“A” standard time) and beating most people.

Athletes don’t have trouble “just passing” an obstacle course.

Then there was the “rope climb”. In grade school, I was one of two kids who couldn’t climb the rope. In college, I failed at my first two attempts; I practiced until I made the first 4 “mandatory” moves on the rope and even added two optional (more advanced) moves.

Athletes had no trouble with the rope climb.

In short, I did ok in PE (mostly Bs, a few As, and a couple of “just barely passes”) but nothing came easy for me; these things did come easy for the athletes (guys recruited for our varsity teams).

Then there were the mathematics classes: I wondered why anyone found concepts like “compact spaces”, “rings” or “groups” difficult.

Palin Loses Fox News?

6 July 09(am)

Workout notes My right hip (the one that didn’t have the injured piriformis) cramped up last night; today was a swim day. I might back off the walking a bit and run a little more. Today I swam; 500 warm up, 10 x (25 fly, 25 free): 2 on 1:10, 4 on 1, 4 on 0:55. 250 drill/swim (fins), 5 x 50 free, 250 drill/swim (fins), 5 x 50 free. Babe doing 55 second laps in the lane next to mine; it was fun to catch her.

Posts

Religion

At least one person is honest about what the Bible says:

(hat tip: Evolved Rational)

I wish that Christians would admit that the Bible has some grossly immoral stuff in it and that they have used human reason to move past it. Ok, some say it, but they usually say it in scholarly works or in private conversations with other educated people.

Politics The climate change bill faces rough sledding in the Senate, at least as far as cloture goes. Here, the goal is to get it to an up or down vote; if we can get it to that the bill would pass. But this is why I won’t give to the DSCC; I don’t want to give a dime to the blue dogs.

On the other hand, when it comes to politics, the peanut gallery doesn’t always have the big picture.

Paul Krugman He rolls his eyes at Joe Biden’s “we misread the economy” statement. He goes on to point out that the stimulus bill was not expected to reduce job loss quickly; and given that it takes time to act that we ought to get a second bill out.

Remember Govenor Palin advising Senator Clinton to not whine?

Daily Kos remembers:

I wonder if she remembers that now? To be fair, she does say that women are held to a different standard and that it isn’t fair. But Sarah Palin’s actions sure don’t look like a “buck it up” type of action.

Vonnegut and Mother Night

I’ve just finished my 5′th Vonnegut book; the ones I have read previously are Man Without a Country, Breakfast of Champions, Monkey House and Slaughterhouse Five. I just finished Mother Night.

This was an early book of his and not the most famous. But I enjoyed it the most.

The protagonist is Howard Campbell Jr. who was an American who did propaganda for the Nazis in Germany during World War II but, on the sly, broadcast instructions to ally spies. He did this by giving exactly timed coughs, throat clears and the like.

Basically, Campbell didn’t truly believe the propaganda that he was spreading (e. g. absurd anti-Semitic claims) but he did it because he was good at it and it pleased the people he was with at the time. Yes, he did stick with it for the double agent reasons, but he made an effort to be good at his “work” and the effort went well beyond just keeping a good cover.

In the story, you find him sympathizing with those who hate him for his propaganda and find him being aided by, that’s right, American fascists!

I won’t tell the rest of the story; it is a quick read.

I can say that this is the second book of his that has been shaped by Vonnegut’s real life experience of being a Prisoner of War in Germany and surviving the allied firebombing of Dresden (contemporary historians estimate between 25,000 and 50,000 were killed; the estimate was much higher when Vonnegut’s books were written).

I will share one very interesting quote. Campbell says this when he observes one of the highly educated American fascists acting in an irrational manner:

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, guady pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

The boos G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones (the fascist). “You’re completely crazy”, he said.

Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell-keepiong perfect time for eight minute and thirty three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten year olds, in most cases.

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information [...]

That is how the fascists are. The Campbell character goes on to say that everyone is missing some gear teeth and most people get a tooth or two ground off by life but never deliberately grind them off themselves.

The other thing that Campbell says is that he views the true believers as people who maybe belong in an insane asylum but that people like him (those who went along, knowing that they were saying false and hateful stuff) were those who really deserved punishment.

I wonder if those who spread hateful, inflammatory rhetoric today will heed this moral?

Update theran at Daily Kos reminded us of the film version of Mother Night:

Here is the trailer.